Jeff Shear

Jeff Shear is the author of the book, The Keys to the Kingdom, which was an investigation into a weapons deal between the US and Japan (the FSX), published by Doubleday. He has been a Fellow at The Center for Public Integrity, in Washington, DC, where he was one of several contributors to the book The Buying of the Congress, published by Avon in 1998. Before that, he served as a staff correspondent for National Journal, with regular venues at the White House and Congress. He has written TV scripts for the National Geographic Channel, Discovery, and The History Channel.

Currently Shear writes the Jackson Guild Saga, in which the hero is the enemy, and Senate investigator Jackson Guild uncovers a plot to set off a nuclear weapon in the beating heart of Washington, DC. Except there's a twist. If Guild exposes the conspirators, he sets off a nuclear exchange, city for city. Populations die. He's jammed-up in a lose-lose situation in which he has to find a way to win, without destroying life as we know it.

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My Intellectual Prosthetic
I discovered the ghost in my computer back in 1987 when I realized my PC worked like an intellectual prosthetic. Of course every computer can be described as an intellectual prosthetic.

By itself, the hard-drive functions as a prosthetic memory. The experience I’m thinking about was stranger and more mysterious. And it was all about writing.
my PC worked like an intellectual prosthetic.
About the time the first PC viru

“… The best depiction of marriage on TV.”
Oh, that. Pretty damn good TV.
Ignore for a moment my recommendation and consider the “digitalness” of the quote above the photo; I’m referring to the HBO blurb.
This blog item is not a review so much as an effort to suss out the Marshall McCluhanness of the show’s marketing digitalia. Or birth. Just c

Opening graph, The Trinity Conspiracy, Book One:
Betrayal at Black Mesa
“I can’t breathe in airports, not anymore; it’s grown dangerous. I’ve got a black Pelican attaché case handcuffed to my left wrist. It’s digging into the base of my thumb. The place stinks of jet fuel. I rub a bead of sweat from my eye and casually troll around for a forty-ish man, tall, thinning hair, wide studious forehead, wearing a gray business suit and no tie. He’s followi

Every word she used was the right word.
Years ago, in college, I attended a writer’s meeting where I heard a young and now very famous author read. She and I were just 21. What remains with me from that evening — and the reason I fell for her on the spot — was that she had perfect diction. Imagine that! Every word she used was the right word. Nothing else would do for what she had to say, no alternatives, no synonyms. And it came naturally to her.

I hunched in the dark oak carrel in the “inner” library at Churchill College Cambridge where they keep the most secret papers of the war. It is a good carrel. My haunt. Perhaps, when I’m gone, they will put my name on a small brass plate and secure it to this, my “workshop.” Caretakers polish the carrel monthly. I feel honored, though it’s not done for my sake. For some days afterward, the carrel carries the fai

There was a knock at the door.
“Come.” I assumed it was staff. The door didn’t open. “Come,” I said more loudly. The door opened and a large, old man walked in carrying an attaché case. He turned stiffly and closed the door behind him.
Story continues below photo…

I recognized Elvin Krongartten from testimony he’d given before the committee. He was well past retirement but was said to run a CIA shop of his own that the Company referred to as the “

She wore a Crayola green faux fur jacket over her shoulders. Because of the subway’s bump and rumble she shifted it around to keep it from slipping off. The fake fur might have looked like a large rug sample on another woman, not on her. The fur appeared pricey, not quite Bergdorf’s but maybe Bloomingdales. She wore it with panache; that is, she that gave it style, not the other way around.
How does that happen

Why are none of the people I know with critical minds questioning Hachette’s attack on Amazon? Without defending Amazon, is it not possible to wonder at Hachette’s motives? Does Hachette hope to wound Amazon out of revenge, because the Justice Department punished the French company for price collusion with Apple? Very likely, in my surmise.
But put that aside.
Why would any thinking person defend the global conglomerates that have ea

Here I am, I thought, stuck behind the looking glass one more time. She wagged a finger at me, which caused her shirttail to part. I noticed the lacy frill of white panties. Now I was the dirty old man.
“I know you so well,” she said, “and I am so pleased and honored to have you here in this house.” She had been drinking. Her words were slurred. She offered her hand. We shook, and her fingers lingered over mine.
“My towel,” I said, “it’s hanging behind

Amazon has been very naughty. Or not. They’re having a dustup with a French monopolist publisher Hachette. Read on. Hachette wanted to pay Amazon less on a coop fees for selling their books. Mr. Bezos didn’t like that. So he retaliated by making Hachette’s newly published books into items Amazoners must pre-order. This will hurt JK Rowling’s sales of her most recent mega book. Ooooo. But wait. Hachette is also zooming up the price of its ebooks. What a strategy! Pour quoi? Look what’s happene

Taping shows for the Holy Neighborhood Network took place in New Mexico, just outside old Santa Fe. Housed in a sound stage the size of an airplane hangar, HNN’s studio’s 30-foot ceilings were crisscrossed with lighting grids that looked liked elevated train tracks. Spotlights hung everywhere. Most of them were turned off. Writing desks and Apple Computers created a little city room in the center of the space. Much of the rest of the room was in semi darkness, but for one bright spot, one ver

My daughter was desperate for blood in the first six weeks after the attack. She had three transfusions, which required seven units of Type O-negative blood per transfusion. Type O-negative is the universal donor. It costs nearly $5,000 a unit and is paid electronically. It’s eaten up my life savings, and the money in my 401K has been frozen. Cash is useless. Everything is paid for in bitcoins and satoshis, a digital currency that was conceived in 2008.
My daughter was

“Death be not proud.” Europe, too
Keith Gessen’s reportage on the Ukraine, “Waiting for War,” appearing in the May 12, 2014 The New Yorker, tells of a historical divorce. And like other divorces, this one has its history (not pretty), but unlike most other separations, this break-up holds the potential for calamity. Though Gessen doesn’t use the metaphor of a failed marriage, the author’s intimacy with the crisis dusts off an irreconcilable fault. “‘I was bor

She walked into the office like she was expecting a round of applause.
“I’m here to see Jimmy,” she said when I asked if I could help her.
“Mr. Holloway is out of the office,” I said, emphasizing the “Mr.” I didn’t like that she’d called him “Jimmy” like she knew him. I didn’t like the idea that she knew him and I didn’t know about it. She looked around the office like she was thinking of renting it but wante

The ONION does not accept submissions. I find that astonishing. I learned of this sad fact after tracking down my first investigative story in years.
Food Preservative Approved for Dead
New Hope for the Obese
— follows after pix (c) 2014 Jeff Shear
Scientists in Milwaukee have found that food preservatives benefit the dead, according to a March study.
Research scientists at Milwaukee Tech Online University have found that the exhumed corp

Some huge force has leaned on Jillian’s home, and when she rushes outside, she meets a nightmare climbing into the sky…
My neighbors had assembled on my lawn, which forms the high ground over Dale Drive, the nearest main road. Everyone was looking up and in the same direction. Carol was there, and Alan, who’d put on a lot of weight in the last year. It was as if they were watching fireworks on the 4th of July, but in slouched silence.
I bunched my robe for

…a proposition and a simple log line
John Turturro’s tour de force “Fading Gigolo” opens on a brick-and-mortar bookshop as it shutting down for the day. Murray, the resigned owner, played by Woody Allen, relates an off-key conversation to Fioravante, played by Turturro, who’s both a customer, a pal, and the guy with a pick-up truck to cart off used books. Woody’s anecdote is a proposition and a simple log line. His dermatologist, Dr. Parker,

While Lying Quietly in Bed, Jillian is suddenly shocked awake…
On a Monday morning, around 10:30, my little Cape Cod-style redbrick in Silver Spring, Maryland went white inside, as if heaven had taken a flash photo of Earth.
A few moments later I felt the Metro Line run under my bed. The train is more than a mile away.
I am Jillian Garth. My little home is dark and surrounded by trees, a 15-minute Metro ride into the heart of Washington. There is a bay wind

Video and Pictures
I met with Jackson Guild a few days ago and did a video. We were talking in a ratty basement that smelled mousey. Like mice were everywhere. Or rats. I kept thinking about Hanta virus.
I’ll give you a look at the video I copped in a second or two. But lemme me say this first. He was more open than I expected, but it was no gab fest. This is only the first piece of the talk. It’s a YouTube “thing.”
He drank the whole

I heard a key enter the front door cylinder. Ellen and I both went silent. My hearing was acute, and I listened to each click in the latch, as pin-by-pin little springs pressed into the cipher of the copper key’s rigid form. In my mind’s eye, I imagined a tiny brass mountain range matching up mirror wise in the lock, grinding the old galling bolt clockwise from its rectangular metal post in the door frame. It snapped to a stop.
More copy follows below image…
I reached across m

Slow, masterful, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (still) works like a striptease, dropping clues like garments to be followed into our narrator’s — a woman known as Offred — cramped reproductive cottage, her henhouse, her life. Here sterility is only surpassed by fear. Looked at coldly, the falling petals of Tyler’s first-person narrative appear to be the work of a novelist feeling her way forward, as if discovering furniture in a dark room. The novel’s revelat

Leave it to Malcolm Gladwell to turn the meatloaf of your opinions into mincemeat. Briefly (and crudely) to the tale Gladwell writes in the March 31, 2014 issues of The New Yorker:
David Koresh and his followers in Waco, Texas perceived the world as they lived it, as a biblical expression. Their lives and their days were drawn from the New Testament. As Gladwell describes him, David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Dividian sect in Waco, was not, as advertised by the media,

Preparing for launch aboard an Atlas 5 from Vandenberg AFB on 11 Dec 12
I noticed that a comment had been posted on G+ by Goretti Campbell, so I thought to begin writing about it and following it.
Few people are aware of the USAF space plane, the X-37B, which is a kind of drone-like space shuttle, only much smaller. There may be two of these orbiters and one of them has been orbiting for close to 500 days. Launch date was 11 Dec 20

Note the date: 229. Letter From Secretary of State Kissinger to Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Fahmy1
Jerusalem, September 1, 1975.
Dear Ismail:
This is to inform you that with respect to Syria, we have an Israeli assurance that Israel will not initiate military action against Syria.
Warm regards,
Henry A. Kissinger2 http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v26/d229 Related articles across the web Egypt supp

“I can arrest you now, and you’ll be looking for a new job tomorrow.” He paused. “I’ll turn you into a blinking red neon sign that reads ‘national security risk.’ How clear is that?” He sniffed again and reached for a handkerchief. “Of course, I don’t want to sound threatening.”

In the short story Veronika, a tough-as-nails blonde, a naïve, randy Brit, and the remnants of pure evil balance on the tip of bildungsroman in hungry Czechoslovakia. Neatly written in the snap-on Cockney vernacular, author Graeme Shimmin regularly breaks through the fourth wall in order to mock himself or set matters in order. “Trouble with that [trick] is every wide boy in England seems to be in the queue in front of you.” For Americans a “wide boy” is a down-scale male